Category Archives: Game Design

This blog is primarily dedicated to musings around systemic design. How we can give more power to the players and generate emergent experiences. One of the things that countless games have done in various ways is combat. Yet, no matter how many combat-driven games gets made, we’re likely to see more of them. Before weContinue reading “Combat Design Philosophy”

Systemic design isn’t really where most of game development traditionally puts its effort. Instead, a word you often hear repeated, rather than “system,” is content. Yelled from the battlements and printed on the plaques. I’ll quote randomly from comment threads, reviews and interviews to illustrate what I mean. Each of them grabbed from the firstContinue reading “The Content Treadmill”

That’s a lot of history and not a lot of substance. Systemic design requires substance (though we can argue whether it requires gamification). Let’s go through som pseudocode that turns all the nonsense in the previous post into practice. Note that there are many different styles of best practice around these subjects. It also variesContinue reading “Gamification, Part 2: Implementation”

Systems generating emergent outcomes or interesting synergies; it’s what most of my blogging is about and my one true passion in game development. Gamification, on the other hand, is usually taken to mean using game elements in a non-game context. Often to keep you engaged by using points awards, competitions, and reward mechanisms of variousContinue reading “Gamification, Part 1: Origin”

Many systemic games require the construction of custom tools. They can be for setting up objects in the simulation, as I’ve covered before, or they can be suited to speeding up tedious processes like asset imports or custom settings of one kind or another. But there is a dark side to custom tools. I callContinue reading “Custom Tools and Work Debt”

First thing’s first: prototyping is a ton of fun, but having fun won’t pay the bills. It’s not uncommon for prototyping to become a stuttering back and forth that wastes tons of time and money. We scrap and start over, because we imagine that a fresh start is all we need. Some refactoring, a newContinue reading “State-Space Prototyping”

Bethesda’s Todd Howard said, “if install base really mattered, we’d all make board games, because there are a lot of tables.” There sure are a lot of tables, and more board games are being made than ever before. But there’s something even more compelling about this line of thinking. When we talk about install baseContinue reading “Platforms in Game Design”

Some time back, I plunged headfirst into the rabbit hole that is systemic game design. It’s turned out to be what I’ve been looking for my whole career and I feel like an idiot for not having discovered it as clearly much earlier. Under this banner, I’ve already covered the First–Person 3Cs, how to makeContinue reading “What Systems Do”

“[A]n object-rich world governed by high-quality, self-consistent simulation systems.” Tom Leonard, Thief: The Dark Project postmortem I don’t always use an epigraph, but when I do, I quote Tom Leonard describing the Looking Glass game design philosophy! There’s not a single word in the quote that doesn’t warrant some further exploration. So let’s dissect it,Continue reading “An Object-Rich World”

I’m talking about systemic implementations of the 3Cs in first-person game design, and this is the part about characters. We’ve already talked about the value of empathy and touched on things like showing the player avatar’s body. But there’s a lot you can do with who you play in first-person games. There won’t be anyContinue reading “First-Person 3Cs: Character”